In the year since Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzaiwas shot in the head by the Taliban for her defiant stance against their ban on girls going to school, she has become an international figurehead for a global campaign for universal education. For many girls in the conservative northwestern corner of Pakistan where she is from, the struggle to go to school continues.

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The Pakistani Taliban took over the Swat valley in 2007. During the nearly three years that they ruled the picturesque valley they maintained control over the local population through a mix of brutal justice and a carefully crafted propaganda campaign transmitted into local homes via an illegal FM radio station, earning the local Taliban commander, Maulana Fazlullah, the nickname Radio Mullah.

“Most women listened. They were influenced. They gave their jewels and stood in front of their husband and children and said ‘Join them, go in the way of Allah,’” said Gul Khandana, the principal of a girls’ elementary school in Matta, an area of Swat that was a center for Taliban support until the Pakistani army began an operation to clear it of militants in the summer of 2009.

“The main thing was the women’s [support for Taliban]. They instigated support for the group. They were blind followers. That is why I am fighting for the girls’ education,” Ms. Khandana said.

Ms. Khandana says that she kept her school, the Sijban Government Girls’ Primary School, open throughout the three years that the Taliban exerted an increasing control over Swat, only closing it during the military operation in 2009.

“When the Taliban started their patrol they would come to the school and threatened to burn it. I said ‘You will have to burn me first and then burn the school,’” she told The Wall Street Journal’s India Real Time as she sat on a string daybed under the eves of her home. “Then I told them, ‘If you don’t allow the girls to school then how can they go to the madrassa [Muslim religious school] and learn Quran?’ Then even the madrassa would not be open to them,” she said with a smile.

Ms. Khandana says this argument bought her some time, but her bigger battle was persuading the parents that they should send their daughters to school – and that it was safe to do so. Her pupils eventually dwindled from over a hundred to zero.

Ms. Khandana left Matta – and her school – in May 2009 just before the Pakistan military’s operation. She spent four months with her husband and five children in a refugee camp run by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies on the edge of Mardan, a city in Khyber Pakthunkhwa province, 90 miles from Matta.

Malala Yousafzai at Harvard University’s Cambridge campus, Sept. 27.

Jessica Rinaldi/Associated Press

She returned to Matta in July 2009 and reopened her school three days later, she says. For the first five days the principal sat in an empty classroom. “I went from door to door begging parents to send girls [to school],” she said. “The mothers were terrified that their child could be harmed.”

After four days, she says, eight girls turned up at school. It has grown since then and today she says that about 900 girls aged between 5 and 12 attend. Matta is also home to one of only 22 girls’ high schools in the Swat Valley. This means that many of Ms. Khandana’s pupils go on to complete their education in the local high school.

But in other villages the lack of high schools means that many girls would have to travel miles to continue to go to school beyond class 8 age 12-13, something that many parents are reluctant to allow. For girls in this area, permission to get an education is often reluctantly granted and then quickly taken away.

Neelam Jihan, 14, lives in Gul Bandai, a remote village 65 miles from Mingora, she stopped going to school aged 10 because there is no high school in the area and her mother wanted her to help look after her siblings at home while she went out to work in the fields.

Nusarat Khan, a teacher at the girls’ primary school in Neelam’s village, says that even if the government opened a local girls’ high school, none of the local female teachers are educated to a high enough level to teach senior classes.

Last year the local government started an initiative to post teachers to more remote areas of the Swat Valley to balance the concentration of schools around Mingora, the largest city in the valley. The initiative failed mainly because few female teachers were willing – or able – to relocate, says Ms. Khan.

“They did not provide proper housing in these places for the female teachers. If they had housing they could move with their family,” Ms. Khan said. She added that she turned down the offer of a promotion in a school in Namul Dagai village on the other side of Swat because she would have had to take three buses to get there. “I would arrive when the school closes,” she said. Ms. Khan doesn’t have a male relative able to escort her to the school, a requirement in the highly conservative area.

On Monday, the Taliban released a statement saying that they would attack Malala again, if given the chance. In public interviews the 16-year-old Pakistani, who now lives in the U.K., has dismissed such threats.

For girls in Swat, the danger for those who seek an education, is still very real.

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India Real Time offers analysis and insights into the broad range of developments in business, markets, the economy, politics, culture, sports, and entertainment that take place every single day in the world’s largest democracy. Regular posts from Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires reporters around the country provide a unique take on the main stories in the news, shed light on what else mattered and why, and give global readers a snapshot of what Indians have been talking about all week. You can contact the editors at indiarealtime(at)wsj(dot)com.